An Inconvenient Truth: Movies and TV Shows ⭐

The day that I canceled my Netflix subscription was a good one. I had long entertained the idea that I would one day round-robin streaming video services, moving from one to the other on a monthly basis. And while I'm not quite there as I write this, I'm closer than I've ever been and, given whatever subscriptions I still pay for, as close as is currently possible.

It is only coincidental that a Netflix price hike, one of many for that and the other streaming services we all pay for, kicked off this series two months ago. But Netflix is, in many ways, unique. We can debate the quality of its various innovations in streaming video, but to me, its biggest contribution has been tightening the vice on subscription sharing, going so far as to charge families for additional members who live outside the home. This shift is what triggered my current stance on subscriptions, first slowly and vaguely and then with more clarity and urgency.

Netflix is also one of the clearest examples of enshittification. Cory Doctorow, who coined that term, tends to focus on the abuses foisted on the world by Big Tech companies like Apple, Google, and Meta, and for good reason. But Netflix is as good an example as any, and better than most, a service that was a no-brainer due to its high value, an excellent combination of low costs and quality content. Until, of course, it wasn't.

I was a Netflix subscriber when the company was shipping thin red envelopes stuffed with DVDs around the country. When Blockbuster Video responded with its own similar but better service, I took advantage of that, too, until Netflix finally snuffed the life out of that business as the world moved inevitably to an all-digital future. The Netflix service we know today started humbly, as an add-on to the DVD business, and the quality of its video library was sub-bargain bin. But that changed in time as Netflix shifted to being streaming-first and then streaming only. It out-HBOed HBO with high quality original content, and it licensed an ever-growing body of existing work.

You don't have to be a student of economic theory to know that, in an ideal world, businesses have competitors, and those competitors keep each other honest. Competition should breed price wars and deals to entice users to switch from one to the other. And yet we live in an era in which there have never been more streaming video services, and the prices have nonetheless gone up repeatedly in lock-step with declining quality. Netflix used to offer top-notch series like Narcos and Orange is the New Black, but now it offers a sea of low-quality licensed content from India that I never want to see and crap like Red Notice, a movie stuffed with A-list actors working in front of green screens because their fees made filming on location untenable.

Three years ago, I paid $19.99 per month for Netflix. Two months ago, Netflix emailed me to tell me about a change in my subscription: It was going up from $24.99 per month...